Linus Goes Loco on Nvidia, Mandriva Lives and OpenSUSE Delayed

June 18, 2012

By
Sean Michael Kerner

It's never a dull week on the Linux Planet. This past week, the father of Linux was once again front and center as he accepted some new honors and dished out some dis-honor as well. On the distro front, Mandriva is trying to stay alive and so too is OpenSUSE.

1) Linus Goes Off The Deep End

Linus Torvalds had a particularly busy week. The founder of Linux was awarded the Millennium award prize worth 600,000 euros for his work creating Linux. The Millennium prize is granted by the Technology Academy of Finland (TAF), Torvalds' home country.

"Thank you to the International Selection Committee and the TAF Board," Torvalds said in a statement. "I'd also like to thank all the people I've worked with, who have helped make the project not only such a technical success, but have made it so fun and interesting."

One group that Torvalds was not thanking was graphics vendor Nvidia. While speaking a the Aalto Center for Entrepreneurship (ACE) in Finland last week, Torvalds vehemently expressed his displeasure with Nvida. He called Nvidia the single worst company that the Linux company has ever dealt with. Torvalds then went a step further expressly saying, 'Nvidia f*ck you." (here's the widely circulated video clip including the question that sparked the response) -

2)Mandriva Linux 2012 Tech Preview

Mandriva is a company that has no shortage of challenges lately as it has teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and total collapse.

Into that environment of uncertainty, Mandriva Linux 2012 Tech Preview has been released. Mandriva developers certainly have a sense of humor and have named the release, Bernie Lomax, named after the dead movie character in Weekend at Bernies.

While Mandriva developers poke fun at themselves with their 'undead' distribution, efforts are starting, to bring that community back to life. As the commercial side of Mandriva fails, the company has publicly stated its intention to turn the distribution over to the community. That community is likely to be run as some form of open source foundation. The first big milestone event is being held on June 19th as a face to face meeting of community members in Paris.

"This working group will be in charge of evaluating the available options and strategies for the future of the Linux distribution, its resources and its governance," Mandriva developer Charles Schulz wrote in a blog post.

3) openSUSE 12.2 Delayed

Another distro now going some transition is openSUSE. This past week, openSUSE developers delayed the upcoming 12.2 release.

The challenge for openSUSE is one of process and growth.

"Right now -- and unlike other Linux distros - we have a git-like model of development," Jos Poortvliet, openSUSE community manager said."Instead of 'blessed' developers who maintain packages, we have teams (devel projects) who are collectively responsible for a number of packages. They work with contributors from outside the projects by way of the usual "branch-fix-merge" way of working that the Linux kernel has. Once everything works in the devel project the team creates a merge request for Coolo (our release manager) for Factory, our development tree."

What all that means is that there are a whole lot of merge requests and that has been a challenge for the project. As to how openSUSE will fix that problem, that's something they're working on – and hence the reason and the need for the delay. OpenSUSE is now scheduled for release in the middle of September.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Most Popular LinuxPlanet Stories

Advertiser Disclosure:
Some of the products that appear on this site are from companies from which QuinStreet receives compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products appear on this site including, for example, the order in which they appear. QuinStreet does not include all companies or all types of products available in the marketplace.